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PAID MOTHERING IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: DUTCH DINNER LADIES AND THEIR DIFFICULTIES
| By Rineke van Daalen |
University of Amsterdam |
| When mothers in developed welfare states took up paid employment, relationships between public and private domains transformed radically. In former welfare arrangements there had been clear dichotomies between work and family life, between men as wage-earners and women as caretakers, between businesslike succinctness and the emotions of private life. This clarity has blurred over the past decades, with confusing consequences as a result.1 |
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This essay addresses the issue of 'putting out to nurse', one aspect of this confusion. It discusses how in the 1970s, mothers in the Netherlands made a start on organizing lunches at school. In doing so, they have modeled lunch-time arrangements according to familiar domestic mother-child patterns. The article demonstrates the consequences of this imitation, in three areas: in terms of the labor position and competences of the 'supervisors' during lunch time (later referred to in this article as 'lunch-time assistant' for school children); in terms of the behavior of the children and their interactions with each other and with the assistants; and thirdly, in terms of the relations between parents, schools and the government. |
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Although an increasing number of children stay at school during the lunchbreak, Dutch schools have so far not been adapted for this purpose. There are no canteens, no kitchens, no cooks; nor are there facilities for recreation and sport. The children take their lunch to school with them, usually packed in a plastic box, sometimes containing substantial sandwiches, sometimes simply tasty nibbles. They eat their lunch in their own classroom. Their parents have to pay for the mealtime drinks, bought and distributed by the assistants. |
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The organization (or rather, lack) of school lunch in the Netherlands shattered my suppositions about the Dutch welfare state as a regulated and ordered system. School lunch is far less regulated by the government than time-honored institutions such as schools themselves; and surprisingly, even less regulated than comparative newcomers like nurseries and child-care arrangements for afterschool hours. These arrangements were established with considerable difficulty, with slow beginnings in the 1960s and 70s, gaining speed in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s.2 |
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Despite the differences in organization and formalization between various sorts of child care arrangements, I consider the problems that I encountered during the lunch break to be typical of institutional child care in the Netherlands. These problems are extreme cases of broader phenomena that in a less blatant form are equally discernable in the organization of other arrangements for child care.3 The lunch-time arrangements may illuminate larger issues, dilemmas and contradictions that are characteristic of the metamorphosis of caring relations that comes about when children are looked after collectively by paid assistants rather than by their own mothers. First and foremost, the informal organization of the school lunch may be seen as characteristic of the downward delegation of child care that takes place as mothering becomes paid work.4 |
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